Capsize

A new collaborative installation and performance by Tad Beck and Jennifer Locke curated by Marjorie Vecchio, PhD

Join us for the opening reception of Capsize and Now he’s out in public and everyone can see on Thursday, 8 March 2012, 8-10PM.

LACE is proud to present Capsize, a new collaborative installation and performance by Tad Beck and Jennifer Locke. Capsize is curated by Marjorie Vecchio, PhD., and will be accompanied by a catalogue published by Sheppard Fine Arts Gallery, University of Nevada, Reno. Taking place on an island off the coast of Maine where Beck had spent many summers both as a child and adult, the two artists developed a body of work utilizing objects, landscape and models from this island incorporating Locke’s approach to action/performance and the camera.

Capsize incorporates an unorthodox utilization of materials through performance, upending the normal order of symbolic relations. The elements of each discrete piece (boat/body/water/camera/model/artist) are shuffled and reshuffled into various permutations, and thus function as a matrix supplying terms for the invention of activities and their positioning within the camera’s frame.

Both artists have worked with the male body in the past, each in their own way. For Beck, the erotic potential of the body is usually coupled with absurdist/humorous activities, utilizing eros as a springboard for looking at more abstract notions of repetition, failure, exertion, voyeurism, and the masculine subject. Locke’s utilization is similarly concerned with exertion and the dynamics of looking/voyeurism, but is also particularly concerned with the way that bodies animate and inhabit a space, the ways in which the presence of a camera and/or viewer transforms that body’s way of occupying physical space, and in so doing explores architectural themes.

PUBLICATION
Curator Marjorie Vecchio, PhD is collaborating with LACE to publish a catalogue that will include a keynote essay by Jennifer Doyle, PhD and an essay by Grant Wahlquist. The catalogue is sponsored by a generous award from the Hilliard Endowment, the Associated Students of the University of Nevada, Reno, the Graduate Student Association and the Friends of Sheppard Gallery. The catalogue will be available at the closing of the exhibition.

ABOUT THE ARTISTSTad Beck received a B.F.A. in Photography from the School of Visual Arts, New York, in 1991, and an M.F.A. in Fine Art from Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, California, in 2003. After relocating to Los Angeles from New York City to attend graduate school, Beck was full time faculty in the intermedia department at the Roski School of Fine Arts, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, for many years. In 2011, Beck returned to New York City, where he now lives and works, in addition to maintaining a summer studio on Vinalhaven, Maine. He is represented by Samuel Freeman Gallery.

Beck was recently the subject of a solo exhibition, Tad Beck: Palimpsest, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2010, for which an artist’s monograph with texts by Brian T. Allen and Michael Ned Holte was produced, and the artist had another solo exhibition at Samuel Freeman Gallery in Santa Monica, California, in 2011. Beck’s work has also been exhibited on the west coast at Jancar Gallery, Los Angeles; Krowswork, Oakland, California; the Sheppard Gallery at the University of Nevada, Reno, and Monte Vista Projects, Los Angeles. His work is represented in the collections of the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Fisher Landau Center for Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Princeton University Art Museum, and the Portland Museum of Art, Maine, among others. More at tadbeck.com

Jennifer Locke composes physically intense actions in relation to the camera and specific architecture in order to explore the unstable hierarchies between artist, model, camera, and audience. Her actions focus on cycles of physicality and visibility, and draw from her experiences as a professional dominatrix, champion submission wrestler, and artists’ model. Locke often creates a separation between her live actions and the audience through the use of material barriers, live video feeds, multiple camera perspectives, wireless microphones, and mini-cameras. These audio-visual reiterations produce a ripple effect, flattening, repeating, echoing, amplifying, and displacing the action by turning it —as well as the audience performing its own spectatorship— into an image of itself.

Locke has exhibited in venues such as the 2010 California Biennial; 48th Venice Biennale; Air de Paris, Paris; the 9th Havana Biennial; La Panaderia, Mexico City; Palais de Beaux-Arts, Brussels; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; the Berkeley Art Museum; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She has curated for Artists’ Television Access and Queens Nails Annex, co-produced a cable access show, sung in punk bands, and given a variety of workshops. Locke received the 2006 Chauncey McKeever Award, a 2010 Goldie, and was recently awarded a 2012 Fleishhacker Foundation Eureka Fellowship. She lives and works in San Francisco and teaches at the San Francisco Art Institute. More at jenniferlocke.net

ABOUT THE CURATORMarjorie Vecchio, PhD, is the Director and Curator of Sheppard Fine Arts Gallery, University of Nevada, Reno. She also teaches MFA and BFA Seminars as well as Gallery Management and Curatorial Practice. Since 1999, she has curated over 35 exhibitions, curated over 230 artists, published 13 scholars, philosophers, writers and poets in 22 catalogs, and has written over 20 catalogs essays. In 2009 she was the inaugural Scholar-in-Residence at Columbus State University, Georgia for her 2012 forthcoming book, The Films of Claire Denis: Intimacy on the Border (IB Tauris, London).

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